This morning I was watching the public works employees picking up trash on our street, and observed one of them take our garbage bin from the truck, then throw it - hard - over the snow heap that's collected on our curb over the past few weeks, onto the sidewalk, where it fell over and clattered to a stop on its side.

And my first thought wasn't, "Dude, that sucks," or "Way to overreact!" Instead, I thought to myself, "Yeah. I get it." Because if I was out in the negative degree wind chill retrieving trash bins from their precarious positions perched on snowbanks by residents who just don't care about anything anymore - residents who have basically been staying inside in their flannel PJS since November, eating comfort food and watching television - then I, too, would probably be throwing stuff around.

This has been the kind of winter, similar to last year's, where the joy normally provided by snowfall and snow days and everything else that comes with the season has been severely diminished by the severity and relentlessness of the weather. I used to like it when it snowed; it's something special, exciting. But last night, as I was driving back from the grocery store and a gusty mini-snowstorm blossomed out of nowhere, I literally said aloud in my car, "Oh, no way, what the hell is THIS?"

I know there are places where it's like this all the time and you can't really complain. But I find Connecticut isn't one of those locales where winter is wholeheartedly embraced, like it is in Minnesota, where they seem to have a lot of fun during colder months, snowshoeing and traveling from building to building in specially constructed tunnels and what have you. I know I'm not a northeast native, but it seems that up here, everybody is just a tiny bit unprepared for such harsh weather over such a long stretch. Every time I take one or both children outside to get them in the car, for instance, the procedure is as follows.

1. Walk down front steps. Everyone nearly dies on some new ice that has materialized.

2. Hold hands on once-shoveled-but-now-treacherous path to driveway. Child - who is absentmindedly "skating" on slippery patch - falls down.

3. Pick up child and hold onto top of car for dear life while hurtling them into carseat.

4. Shuffle to driver's side. Turn heater to highest level. Curse everything.

If I had at some point gotten realistic about this weather, instead of continually assuming that warmer temps would be here in, oh, a week or two and none of this would be an issue anymore, maybe I would have tried harder to improve the ins and outs of my day to day existence in this climate. Instead I'm muddling through as though not embracing this lifestyle will hasten spring's arrival. No luck there yet.

But when it does come, trust me, I'll be as crazy as the rest of these CT natives, wearing short sleeves on 50 degree days and sunbathing on the asphalt. The grass, too, once the snow is gone, which I'm estimating has gotta happen by June. July, at the latest.